Big Sur, Round 2

On Sunday, I ran one of the best races of my life out on the coast of California. I finished up in 25th place at the Big Sur International Marathon with a time of 2:55:41. That’s almost seven minutes faster than I ran the same course back in 2012, and I’m thrilled about that. It felt like wrapping up unfinished business to go back and get the sub-3 that I missed last year. That’s also my fifth fastest marathon anywhere and, for that to come on such a tough course feels like quite an accomplishment.

I had been thinking about this race for a long time and, in the later miles, I was able to use that to my advantage. I thought of all the times in recent months when I had been climbing hard up a hill while visualizing Big Sur’s Hurricane Point and, in doing so, reminded myself how upset I would be if I missed this opportunity to run my best. Every time it started to hurt and I wanted to slow down, I forced myself to speed up instead.

As a result, I ran a decent negative split. I went through the half in 1:29 and change, so the second half was 3–4 minutes faster than the first. Part of that is, of course, because Hurricane Point (the toughest hill of the day, by far) is in the first half, but it’s still a nice feeling to finish up strong.

I’m hoping that the effort didn’t beat me up too badly because I have another marathon on the calendar in just a few days. I’m headed out to Pittsburgh to promote the RW Half at the expo and then run the Pittsburgh Marathon on Sunday. I took yesterday and today completely off, with a very light recovery jog on Monday. Hopefully the extra light mileage this week will speed up recovery.

As always, running the race as part of the Runner’s World Challenge was such a great experience. Every one of these weekends that I go on gets me recharged about running – all of the energy that you Challengers bring to the events is infectious. The shakeout run along the beach in the fog will definitely remain in my mental highlight reel of the year. (Also, when I ran back out to the beach later and jumped into the very chilly – but refreshing – ocean.)

If I get the opportunity to run Big Sur again, I’ll definitely take it, but I imagine I’d go at it with a different approach. Now that I have a time there that I’m happy with, it would be great to go back, run slower, and just really soak up all of the amazing scenery along the way. Hopefully someday soon…

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